An integrated development environment (IDE) provides a set of tools to assist in the development of a computer program. Such an environment generally supports various tasks and often various programming languages. Given the integration between various files forming a computer program project, each time a file is changed the file is validated to ensure that information on the file in the environment is correct. The validation involves parsing each file that changed as well as each file that the changed file references. If there are N changed files that all reference each other then N*N parses are performed. Since file-to-file dependencies may not be maintained, all of these files are generally parsed. To ensure correctness of the data in a workspace in the IDE, the time for such validation is not amortized over other operations. With a workspace composed of many files or large files, it can be cumbersome to wait for validation of a file, involving completely parsing many files, after each change before proceeding with other actions.